Frontiers in Zoology BioMed Central Short report Open Access Molecular species identification boosts bat diversity Frieder Mayer*1, Christian Dietz2 and Andreas Kiefer3 Address: 1University of Erlangen; Department of Zoology; Staudtstrasse 5; D-91058 Erlangen; Germany, 2University of Tübingen; Department of Animal Physiology; Auf der Morgenstelle 28; D-72076 Tübingen; Germany and 3University of Mainz; Department of Zoology; Becherweg 13; D- 55099 Mainz; Germany Email: Frieder Mayer* -
[email protected]; Christian Dietz -
[email protected]; Andreas Kiefer - akiefer@uni- mainz.de * Corresponding author Published: 12 February 2007 Received: 20 September 2006 Accepted: 12 February 2007 Frontiers in Zoology 2007, 4:4 doi:10.1186/1742-9994-4-4 This article is available from: http://www.frontiersinzoology.com/content/4/1/4 © 2007 Mayer et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract The lack of obvious morphological differences between species impedes the identification of species in many groups of organisms. Meanwhile, DNA-based approaches are increasingly used to survey biological diversity. In this study we show that sequencing the mitochondrial protein-coding gene NADH dehydrogenase, subunit 1 (nd1) from 534 bats of the Western Palaearctic region corroborates the promise of DNA barcodes in two major respects. First, species described with classical taxonomic tools can be genetically identified with only a few exceptions. Second, substantial sequence divergence suggests an unexpected high number of undiscovered species.